Filed: NHS

As a child of the welfare state, I have great affection for the National Health Service which is one the reasons I was proud to have worked on its behalf, but sometimes I despair of the state it is in. One of the reasons I have posted even less than usual is because my dad has been quite ill lately. I won’t go into the detail except to say that…
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As Yorkshire Pudding rightly points out, idleness has become a way of life for some of us and a very pleasant change it is too compared to the hustle and bustle of our working lives.

I’m two and a half weeks into a two month project that is keeping me busy for much of the week and I admit that I’m starting to miss my hours of idleness – or creative pottering as I prefer to think of it…Read more ›››

Britain is failing to keep pace with improvements in public health in other Western countries despite NHS spending tripling over the past 20 years.

So says The Telegraph following the publication of a report in the Lancet on life expectancy in the UK and it really does annoy me. Not that we can expect to slip off this mortal coil a few years early, but the way that journos and those with a drum to bang link things that aren’t necessarily connected.Read more ›››

Some years ago, I had to organise a meeting of NHS communications people at which a couple of Department of Health bods were to speak. The idea was to create a better understanding within the service of the needs of central government.

It should have been a routine, straight forward affair but my antennae began to twitch when I noticed a couple of hospital chief executives among the thirty or so people in the audience.Read more ›››

Scary places though hospitals can be, it’s surprising how quickly you can start to feel at home if you visit often enough. For me that means looking for things to photograph. And having shown some of the old buildings at Tameside Hospital the other day, I thought I should balance things out with some of the new.Read more ›››

Blog writing and reading has taken a back-seat this week for various reasons, the most important of which is that Mrs P went into hospital yesterday for a long postponed hip replacement operation.

It is a problem that has caused her pain and discomfort for many years, but which has become much more so in the last twelve months and more. The decision to replace it could not be put off any longer.Read more ›››